Facebook, struggling to make money out of its growing mobile audience and under fire over its share price plunge, is taking a third shot at building a smartphone of its own.
It has reportedly hired more than half-a-dozen former Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone, to create its own smartphone software and hardware, as it reacts to the growing threat from the mobile web.
The Facebook smartphone is scheduled for release by next year. The planned launch would open another front with internet search leader Google which is already into hardware via its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility earlier this week.
A foray into the smartphone hardware business could help Facebook counter Google’s move.
Facebook, which last fortnight floated on the Nasdaq stock market, has also just launched its own mobile app store.
The App Centre currently offers links to Facebook-enabled apps within Apple’s iOS and Google Android stores but developers will soon be able to write apps to be placed exclusively in Facebook’s store.
The first attempt at smartphone, in 2010, was scrapped when the firm realised the difficulty it would face turning itself from a software developer into a hardware maker. Another effort, in cooperation with the Taiwanese smartphone firm HTC and codenamed “Buffy”, is still under development.
With its new, hand-picked smartphone engineers, Facebook is now reportedly going “deeper into the process, by expanding the group working on Buffy, and exploring other smartphone projects too, creating a team of seasoned hardware engineers who have built the devices before”.
The migration of web users to smartphones and tablets was named in Facebook’s regulatory filings for its recent flotation as one of the main threats facing it as a business. It currently makes no meaningful revenue from mobile app users, who are growing in number more rapidly than traditional website users.
Meanwhile the smartphone market remains dominated by Apple, which has integrated Twitter into iOS, and devices running Android, a mobile operating system created by Google, Facebook’s main advertising rival on the web.
“Mark [Zuckerberg] is worried that if he doesn’t create a mobile phone in the near future, then Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms,” a Facebook employee told the New York Times.
Facebook is reportedly aiming to keep its latest smartphone effort as secret as possible, by headhunting individuals rather than advertising vacancies on the team. Facebook has seemingly learned from its 2010 experience and is focused on recruiting hardware specialists.
A Facebook spokesman is reported to have said: “We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers and application developers.”
The company’s desire to enter the smartphone market could be a result of increasing pressure to improve the potential of mobile to make money.
In a statement for potential investors ahead of its initial public offering earlier this month, the company admitted it had concerns about more users accessing Facebook through their mobile -- a trend which could make it more difficult to sell advertising.
“Our mobile strategy is simple: we think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social,” the statement read.
“We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world.”
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